Earlier this year, SAP Signavio welcomed Knoa as a new Solution Extension (SOLEX) partner (SAP Signavio's New Strategic Partnership with Knoa in Task Mining for Business Process Transformatio...). The integration of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence with Knoa's task mining data offers a comprehensive approach to process optimization. This approach enables SAP customers to analyze granular user behavior within business processes, so they can optimize process execution, reduce support costs, and improve overall user experience.
Process Mining and Task Mining
Task mining seamlessly complements process mining by offering a comprehensive view of a company's processes. By providing data-driven insights, it enriches the process transformation lifecycle, enhancing the understanding, optimization, and continuous improvement of business processes.
As McKinsey analysts point out in a recent study on process and task mining technologies, “combining the two tools in a thoughtful, targeted manner gives improvement teams a 360-degree view of their operations, helping them design interventions that lead to substantial and sustainable performance improvements” (Better together: process and task mining, a powerful AI combo).
SAP customers can now gain a complete picture of how processes are executed. This is achieved through a new service available from Edison, a leading SAP and Knoa partner, that combines task mining data from SAP UEM by Knoa and process mining data from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. This integration service is the result of a close collaboration between SAP, Knoa, and Edison.
Merging process and task mining data enhances a process team’s ability to track and improve their business processes by bringing visibility into the “human” components of process execution, such as:
- user adoption of the SAP software used in process execution
- user experience of system performance when executing their tasks
- user’s ability to execute a process without errors
Knoa Task Mining Data
Knoa’s task mining brings a new layer of visibility into process execution, which is otherwise not available with process mining tools. The Knoa solution generates a detailed log of user interactions with the SAP system, including:
- Step by step screen interactions, with measurements of active and idle time for each screen used in the process
- Detection of application error messages, both user-generated and system-generated, along with contextual information
- Interactions with UI controls, such as button presses and hyperlink clicks, along with their corresponding end-to-end response time
- User and SAP system information that is associated with every event
SAP Signavio Process Intelligence and SAP UEM by Knoa
The integration between the two solutions tackles common customer challenges, including software inefficiencies, process bottlenecks, user errors, compliance issues, and high operational costs. By identifying these pain points through an end-to-end view of process execution, businesses can streamline processes and improve overall efficiency.
Based on this enhanced process analysis that combines macro-level process KPIs with micro-level task metrics, SAP process managers and analysts can accurately detect and measure the human contribution to process performance, such as:
- What happens during the execution and waiting time of a business activity
- The active time spent on each task, and the idle or unproductive time
- From a discovery point of view, what a business activity (such as creating a PO) entails for the user/organization
Here are some of the analysis scenarios enabled by this integration:
Use Case 1: End to End View of Process Execution
Questions that customers can answer using this scenario:
- What was the execution flow for a given process step?
- What sequence of activities did users perform?
- What errors were encountered at each step in the process?
- What was the user experience of system performance during the process?
Using this information, the process team for a Procure to Pay process can identify steps that result in approval delays or time-consuming manual activities for matching invoices, purchase orders, and receipts, that introduce a logjam into the process. Accordingly, they can perform root cause analysis and prioritize improvement actions based on actual user behavior.
Use Case 2: Identify Errors Impacting Process Performance
Questions that customers can answer using this scenario:
- Which were the most frequent error conditions impacting user productivity?
- Where in the process (which screens, transactions, or process steps) were the most errors encountered?
Using this information, the process team for a Procure to Pay process can identify error conditions that result in inaccurate or incomplete vendor data in the system, or missing information on requisitions, which can cause delays as they get kicked back for clarification and correction. Some cases may require targeted action through improved training for the agents involved at the relevant steps in the process, while others may require more systemic changes to the process design.
Use Case 3: Measure the Human Cost of User Interactions during the Process
Questions that customers can answer using this scenario:
- On which application screens or transactions are users spending most of their active or idle time?
- Can the process execution time be improved by streamlining the application or process design?
Using this information, the process team can identify steps that require a high degree of human interaction or manual work. Similarly, lack of adoption for certain transactions may be indicative of insufficient training or poor application usability.
Use Case 4: Measure the System Impact on Process Performance
Questions that customers can answer using this scenario:
- Which screens or transactions have the slowest performance in the process, impacting user productivity and user experience?
- What steps in the process are a bottleneck in terms of system performance?
Using this information, the process team can accurately pinpoint the segments of the process where application performance and user experience should be improved, to deliver a better overall customer and employee experience.
Integration Architecture
The diagram below represents a high-level view of the integrated solution, along with the key data flows between SAP and Knoa components.
While employees execute business transactions in the SAP system, two independent data streams are generated in the background:
- SAP process logs, which are then ingested into SAP Signavio Process Intelligence for process-centric analytics
- Knoa task and user behavior logs, which are then ingested into SAP Signavio process Intelligence for task-centric analytics
Taking as an example the SAP Procure to Pay process (P2P) executed through the SAP GUI client application, this process consists of the following steps:
- A purchase requisition is created using ME51N
- The purchase requisition is released using ME54N
- A purchase order is created using ME21N
- The purchase order is released using ME29N or ME28
- Place a goods receipt purchase order using MIGO
- Enter Incoming Invoice using MIRO
- Post outgoing payments using F-53
SAP UEM by Knoa collects the detailed user's interactions with the SAP system anywhere in the process, across any application screens, including for custom transactions. Specifically, Knoa generates the following trail of user activities:
- SAP Client ID
- SAP GUI client user (this can also be anonymized)
- Screen interactions (screen titles, active and idle time spent on screen)
- User operations (operation names and response time)
- Error messages (contents of user errors, system errors, and info messages)
- Event timestamps
- Full user journeys through the application
The Knoa solution also detects selected “business identifiers”, such as Purchasing Document Number and Item Number of Purchasing Document, to enable the correlation of task mining data with process mining data based on Case IDs. This information is specific to each process being monitored.
Once the Knoa task mining data has been ingested into SAP Signavio Process Intelligence and correlated with the process mining data for a target process, different blended views are available, in support of various analysis scenarios.
Below is a snapshot of sample Knoa events ingested in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence and tagged with the Case ID information:
Along with this information, attribute data such as SAP transaction codes, application screen titles, contents of error messages, and UI controls the user is interacting with are also available in the Knoa task mining data repository:
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of the integrated solution is to provide process managers and analysts with a simple answer to a straightforward question: “Are my business processes executed efficiently and effectively?”. With this two-pronged approach of employing process and task mining analytics, companies can deliver both increased operational efficiency and better customer and employee experience.
About Knoa
Knoa has been an SAP Solution Extension partner for 16 years. SAP User Experience Management by Knoa is used by millions of end-users worldwide to ensure successful adoption and efficient use of the ERP solutions that drive the success of their businesses. To learn more about Knoa’s task mining solution, see Knoa Task Mining for SAP Signavio.
About Edison
Edison is a leader in business process management and user, employee, and customer experience projects. They are an SAP and Knoa partner, with a comprehensive range of services for the Knoa and SAP Signavio solutions including implementation, enablement, consulting and managed services.
This blog was authored in collaboration with the following contributors: Bogdan Nica (VP of Product, Knoa Software) and Carlos Pozo (Director, Edison).
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